Senate Finance Committee Chair Orrin Hatch told reporters Tuesday that he would give Democrats “more time” to come around on their boycott of a committee meeting to vote on two of President Trump’s cabinet nominees before changing the committee rules to advance the nominees to a floor vote.
Earlier Tuesday, at the morning meeting where the Finance Committee was scheduled to vote on the confirmations, Hatch said that he was “disappointed” with Democrats’ refusal to show up at the meeting, stalling the confirmation process for Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) as Health and Human Services secretary and Steven Mnuchin as Treasury secretary.
“Now I am hopeful that when we schedule this again, that they’ll be here,” Hatch said Tuesday morning. “But we are going to do this again, throughout the day and see if they will come and do the job that they have been elected and sworn to do.”
Democrats say the two nominees misled committee members in their testimony. The committee’s ranking member, Sen. Rob Wyden (D-OR), told reporters Tuesday that they were reaching out to officials at a biomedical company that had commented in a Wall Street Journal story alleging that Price had received a sweetheart deal on stock trade.
The CEO of the company, Innate Immunotherapeutics, Ltd., panned the story, in an email accidentally sent to CNN, arguing the the story was “NOT factually correct.”